Red Hat and other Eclipse IoT members will collaborate in working group to extend capabilities of Kubernetes for IoT Edge use cases

OTTAWA, Sept. 26, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Eclipse Foundation today announced that it is collaborating with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) on a new Kubernetes IoT Edge Working Group to address the surging demand for Kubernetes in IoT cloud and edge environments. IDC forecasts worldwide spending on IoT to reach $1.2 trillion in 2022, and Kubernetes’ footprint is rapidly expanding in large-scale IoT deployments. The Kubernetes IoT Edge Working Group will focus first on evolving Kubernetes to support IoT workloads at the edge (a $2.1 billion market by 2021, according to IDC), and will define key use cases and requirements alongside CNCF, Eclipse Foundation members, and the entire ecosystem and community of users.

Kubernetes in IoT is still new on the adoption curve, but already showcases impressive success stories. Earlier this summer, Chick-fil-A wrote about deploying “mini data centers” at 2,000 restaurants with 6,000 devices at the edge running Kubernetes -- which served to remove the dependency on Internet connections and to support low latency requirements for business critical IoT. Bosch Software Innovations also uses Kubernetes to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containers across its Bosch IoT Suite and leverages Eclipse Hono and Eclipse Ditto to reliably scale to millions of connected devices.

Similar to the role that the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python) played as the open source backbone of commercial web applications, the IoT industry is collaborating on open source and rushing to form a stack of complementary technologies for building IoT systems. The new Kubernetes IoT Edge Working Group is the collaboration between the Eclipse IoT Working Group and its 40 member companies and 35 open source projects, and the Kubernetes ecosystem to define terminology, identify gaps in deployment and management, educate the market on common use cases and typical scenarios for IoT solutions, put standard metrics in place, and identify open source projects that could help.

"Companies with commercial interests in IoT are facing a common set of infrastructure challenges at the edge,” said Dejan Bosanac, Engineer at Red Hat, and lead for Kubernetes IoT Edge Working Group. “IoT and edge applications have many distributed components that don't usually sit together within the same datacenter infrastructure. There are messaging challenges, security has to be re-invented for every application and service, and there are integration and data locality issues with sidecar services. These are issues that shouldn't have to be re-invented every time -- they should be open source infrastructure with broad industry support. Red Hat and this working group see Kubernetes and other cloud-native projects in its orbit as having broad potential sitting between gateways, edge nodes and cloud platforms. Much like the LAMP stack was instrumental to the web-applications era, this group is focused on accelerating a Kubernetes stack for running cloud infrastructure and distributed components at the IoT edge."

“The collaboration between the Kubernetes and Eclipse IoT communities will enable the development of a truly open ecosystem for distributed IoT edge computing,” said Eclipse Foundation Executive Director, Mike Milinkovich. “The complexity of orchestrating IoT systems is a problem domain that Kubernetes is a perfect fit for, and many complementary open source projects are under the Eclipse IoT umbrella, so we’re very excited to work with the CNCF to support this surge of interest around Kubernetes in IoT.”

“Kubernetes is the orchestration platform of choice for building hybrid cloud services, and we see it playing a major role in future IoT and Edge deployments,” said Chris Aniszczyk, COO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “CNCF is proud to collaborate with the vibrant Eclipse community through the newly formed Kubernetes IoT Edge Working Group to accelerate innovation and market adoption of cloud native IoT.”

By joining the Kubernetes IoT Edge Working Group, companies and individuals can participate in an open process that encourages contributions from all to define priorities and deliver the roadmap. For more information, please visit the Kubernetes IoT Edge Working Group community page.

About Eclipse IoT

The Eclipse IoT Working Group is a collaborative working group hosted by the Eclipse Foundation, that is working to create open source software for IoT solutions. Eclipse IoT is made up of over 40 member companies and 35 open source projects.

About Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Cloud native computing uses an open source software stack to deploy applications as microservices, packaging each part into its own container, and dynamically orchestrating those containers to optimize resource utilization. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of cloud native software stacks, including Kubernetes and Prometheus. CNCF serves as the neutral home for collaboration and brings together the industry’s top developers, end users and vendors – including the world’s largest public cloud and enterprise software companies as well as dozens of innovative startups. CNCF is part of The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization. For more information about CNCF, please visit www.cncf.io.

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Quote Sheet Addendum

List of quotes from interested parties stating their support for the initiative.

Bosch Software Innovations

“Bosch Software Innovations has been a leading adopter of Kubernetes for IoT cloud services. Being an innovator of IoT solutions, Bosch IoT Suite makes extensive use of Kubernetes to scale and manage a comprehensive set of IoT cloud services. The collaboration between the Eclipse IoT WG and CNCF to extend the usage of Kubernetes in IoT use cases is something we support. Bosch Software Innovations views open source as being a critical driving force to the IoT industry.”-- Caroline Buck, Product Owner Bosch IoT Suite, Bosch Software Innovations

Eurotech

“As a founding member of the Eclipse IoT Working Group, Eurotech is excited to contribute to this new initiative in order to advance the adoption of Cloud technologies into IoT solutions. As firm believer of modular IoT Edge Frameworks, Eurotech is welcoming the opportunity of bringing containerization and service orchestration to the Edge. The efforts of the Kubernetes IoT Edge Working Group will aim at leveraging this technology as a unified management and orchestration layer for IoT Cloud Services and IoT Edge nodes.”-- Marco Carrer, CTO, Eurotech

InfluxData

“As active members of the community and members of Eclipse and CNCF, InfluxData is deeply committed to lending its expertise around metrics and events, and other time series data. As the leading time-series database we are excited to help contribute to the reference architectures that enable seamless data collection and actionable analytics from the edge to the cloud.” -- David G. Simmons, Senior Developer Evangelist for InfluxData

Red Hat

“The Internet of Things is first and foremost a cloud-based computing paradigm, and with Linux containers and Kubernetes emerging as a de facto foundation for building and orchestrating hybrid cloud services we expect to see more and more IoT applications deployed in Kubernetes environments. We are excited to be part of the new Kubernetes IoT Edge Working Group and look forward to helping advance both technologies.”-- James Kirkland, Chief Architect for IoT, Red Hat

Siemens

“Siemens as a leading player in Industrial IoT (IIoT) welcomes the collaboration and set-up of the new Kubernetes IoT Edge Working Group to jointly address next steps in digitalization of the industrial space. The special interest of Siemens in this new group is on requirements and extensions of Kubernetes to orchestrate IIoT systems in mixed cloud and industrial edge environments. Secure and automated deployment and management of industrial IoT applications from cloud to edge will benefit from results of this working group.” -- Marquart Franz - Senior Principal Key Expert, Siemens AG

Vapor IO

“Kubernetes will undoubtedly play a critical role as Vapor IO deploys a nationwide Kinetic Edge. Scheduling and scaling workloads across thousands of Kinetic Edge nodes will not be performed by humans; orchestration systems like Kubernetes must automate edge scheduling, analyzing dozens of data sources and applying specific policies in real time. As the Kinetic Edge blurs the line between the wireless and wireline worlds, we must extend Kubernetes to support edge native applications. We’re thrilled to be part of The Kubernetes IoT Edge Working Group and look forward to bringing these ideas to light.”-- Cole Crawford, founder and CEO of Vapor IO

VMware

“Centralized data centers and public clouds have been a limitation on the current generation of IoT. Locality of devices from data centers and scale has so far limited the fidelity of information made available. Kubernetes and its ability to dynamically manage applications at the edge is a huge evolutionary step for IoT. Extending cloud platforms in these environments to enable enhanced IoT services will make way for the next generation of IoT devices. VMware is excited to join the efforts and to see communities connect to accelerate the development of edge computing.” -- Clint Kitson, director of engineering, Cloud Native Applications Business Unit, VMware

For the Eclipse FoundationContact:Lonn Johnstonlonn@flak42.com+1 650.219.7764

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